From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. William Dalrymple

weeks: summer is the fighting season.

      I plan to set off to the south-east next week. Antioch – modern Antakya – is on the edge of the trouble. Once there it should be easier to judge how bad things really are: it is virtually impossible to gauge the difficulty of getting to the Syrian Orthodox monasteries from here, and the situation changes from day to day. Inshallah it should be possible to get through without taking any unreasonable risks. Hugh has given me the name of a driver in Diyarbakir who last year was willing – for a price – to drive him into the war zone.

      He also raised the question of whether I should get a press card. On the one hand, he says, the authorities in the south-east hate all journalists: last year his wife was beaten up by the police in Nusaybin when she produced her card. On the other hand, he says that no one will believe me if I say I’m a tourist – no tourist has gone anywhere near the south-east for three or four years now – and if I have no Turkish ID he tells me that there is a real possibility that I could get arrested for spying.

      On my return from supper I asked the advice of Metin, the hotel receptionist, whose home is in the south-east. He seems to think my plans are hysterically funny. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll only get shot if you run into a PKK roadblock, and only get blown up if you drive over a landmine. Otherwise the south-east is fine. Completely safe. In fact highly recommended.’

      Becoming serious, Metin said that if the police did not arrest me, and if I did not drive over any landmines, there was always the delightful possibility of being kidnapped by the PKK. This happened last year to three British round-the-world cyclists. They were not in the least harmed, but as the guerrillas cannot light fires – that would reveal their whereabouts to the army – the hostages were forced to live for three months on snake tartare and raw hedgehog.

      ‘The tourists should consider themselves lucky,’ said Metin. ‘If it had been Turkish soldiers that had fallen into the PKK’s hands, they would have had their dicks cut off. Then the PKK would kill them. Roasted them over a fire or something. Very slowly. Chargrilled them.’

      ‘And this sort of thing still goes on?’

      ‘These guys are committing mass murder right now,’ answered Metin.

      ‘But they only do that to Turkish soldiers, right?’

      ‘You can’t be too careful in the east,’ said Metin, twirling his moustache. ‘As they say in Ankara: Kurdistan is like a cucumber. Today in your hand; tomorrow up your arse.’

      ISTANBUL, 3 AUGUST

      My last day in Istanbul; tonight the train.

      This morning I went to the Phanar to say goodbye to Fr. Dimitrios, and to collect the letters of introduction he has written to the hegumenoi (abbots) of the Greek monasteries in the Holy Land and Sinai.

      Running down the stairs from Fr. Dimitrios’s office, I knocked into a visiting Greek monk who was crouching in the doorway leading into the courtyard, feeding the sparrows. I apologised and we fell into conversation. He said he had been to England once but did not like it much. ‘It was so sad,’ he remarked. ‘All the churches were closed. In Ipswich I went. Not one church was open. Not one!’ He added darkly: ‘I read in a magazine that the head of the Satan Cult lives in England.’

      He disliked London and was unimpressed by Buckingham Palace. In fact only two places really appealed to him. One was Kew: ‘Your Kew Gardens! So beautiful! So lovely! I would feed the squirrels and bring them nuts.’ The other was a shop in Lambeth which sold religious trinkets. From his suitcase the monk produced a small plastic hologram of Christ. ‘It is so beautiful, no? It is by a Swiss artist and is based on the exact likeness of Jesus. Some of the other monks think it is not pleasing to look at, but I do not understand why. Walk around: look! Now our Lord is smiling! Now he is showing his sobriety! Now he is dead. Now he is risen! Alleluia! It is so beautiful, no? I carry it with me always.’

      A night ferry across the black Bosphorus to Haydarpasha, the Anatolian railhead of the old Berlin to Baghdad railway that T. E. Lawrence spent so long trying to blow up. Tomorrow to Ankara to pick up my press card.

      On the train the conductor had no record of my reservation. But he asked me my nationality, and when I told him, I thought I saw a brief flicker of terror cross his face; certainly, I was immediately upgraded to first class. Only when I sat eating supper in the station restaurant did I discover the reason for this uncharacteristically flexible behaviour: there was a European Cup soccer match that evening between Manchester United and Galatasaray, and the television news was full of the English visitors’ traditional pre-match activities: trashing restaurants, picking fights, beating up innocent Turks and so on. For the first time I felt grateful for English football’s international reputation for hooliganism: it seemed that my compatriots from Manchester had unknowingly guaranteed me a first-class berth for the night.

      NIGHT BUS BETWEEN ANKARA AND ANTIOCH, 6/7 AUGUST

      4.15 a.m.: This is a horrible way to travel. It is nearly dawn, and the first glimmer of light has illuminated an expanse of flat plains covered by a wraith of thin mist. The rutted roads, the bracing crash of the long-defunct suspension, the snoring Anatolian peasants: these one expects and can bear. What is intolerable is the deliberate regime of sleep deprivation imposed on all passengers by this driver and his henchman, the moustachioed Neanderthal of a conductor.

      Every other hour we pull in to some seedy kebab restaurant. The lights are put on, we are shaken awake and a Turkish chanteuse is put on the Tannoy so loud that we have no option but to vacate the bus. The driver and his friend disappear behind the scenes to pick up their commission from the restaurant owner, while we are all expected to make merry with plateloads of malignant kebabs or, even more horrible in the middle of the night, bags full of sickly-sweet Turkish delight.

      Worse is to follow. On returning to our seats, the Neanderthal marches down the aisles, gaily shaking eau de cologne over the outstretched hands of the passengers. This can be quite refreshing at three o’clock on a hot afternoon; but it is irritating beyond belief at three o’clock in the dull chill of the early morning. And so on we trundle, rattling and shaking like a spin dryer, smelling like a tart’s boudoir, tempers rising steadily with each stop.

      6 a.m.: We pull in to a particularly run-down kebabji which, with horrible inevitability, has suddenly materialised from nowhere amid the grey wastes of Anatolia. We stumble out of the bus and obediently line up for our breakfast, smelling like a collection of extras from some spectacular epic of an after-shave advertisement. Too weak to argue, too tired to care, I join the queue and load my plate with some slurry that must once have been an aubergine.

      8 a.m.: Issus, site of Alexander’s great victory over the Persians. It may be one of the turning points in world history, but it’s a miserable-looking place now: a scrappy village with a petrol pump, a derelict electricity station and the statutory seedy restaurant over which hangs a terrible smell of grease and dead animal.

      My neighbour in the bus, a garrulous traffic policeman from Istanbul, made the mistake of eating a kebab at the last stop and is now being noisily ill in the street; he has attracted a small circle of onlookers who appear to take the view that this is the most interesting thing to have happened in Issus for several months. Despite the early hour, it is already hot and muggy. We’re through the Cilician Gates and heading into the plains. On the far side of the road parties of bedraggled peasants are standing in lines, hoeing the dead ground beside the cotton and tobacco fields – or at least some are: most have put down their implements to watch my friend’s streetside evacuations.

      The men here are a rough-looking bunch, scowling, ill-kempt and unshaven. But – looking around the motley crew filling the tables around me, and glimpsing my own reflection in the mirror – who are we to talk?

      9 a.m.: Antioch: a gridiron of dirty alleyways surrounded on three sides by the crescent cliffs of Mount Silpius. As we leave the bus for the last time and stumble into the glare of the bus station the smirking Neanderthal offers us a last splash of eau de cologne.